The universe of Quentin Tarantino is populated by characters who aren’t exactly real, but rather combine a jumble of movie types — the cool/stoned hitmen of Pulp Fiction, say, or the spiritual/violent kung fu masters of Kill Bill — into a pastiche of borrowed cinematic worlds. Inglourious Basterds, a fantasy of Second World War revenge, was the pop culture spin on war films (particularly a 1978 Italian movie — Tarantino is a sucker for genre). The fractured history continues in his new movie, Django Unchained, which is the meeting place of the spaghetti western and American slavery: the man with no name meets the men with no hope.

Set in 1858, just before the Civil War, it’s both a brutal bloodbath and a satisfying reinvention of the past, and it is edifying, or at least interesting, that it comes on the heels of Lincoln, a shaded biography of the man who freed the slaves but had to extend a brutal war to do it. Django doesn’t free that many slaves, but he’s hell on slave-owners.

He’s played by Jamie Foxx, who begins the picture as a slave recently sold at auction and forced to walk in a long chain gang to his next plantation. Into his life rides Dr. Schultz, a travelling dentist who drives a coach with a wooden molar bouncing merrily on top. But Schultz isn’t your ordinary doctor: he’s a bounty hunter, played by Christoph Waltz — the dangerously learned Nazi Col. Hans Landa of Inglourious Basterds — with the same exaggerated politeness and verbal gymnastics. “Keep your caterwauling down to a minimum,” he tells a man he has just shot off his horse.

Schultz needs Django because he can identify his next targets, a group of vicious slavers, of which Django Unchained is richly endowed, each of them more grizzled, sadistic and leering than the next. Eventually he takes Django into his employ as an assistant, stupefying the residents of several southern towns (“There’s a n—– on a horse!”) but finding a natural-born killer inside the ex-slave. “Kill white folks and they pay you for it?” Django asks. “What’s not to like?”

Eventually, they head off on their mission: to free Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from a slave owner named — with no little irony — Calvin Candie and played by Leonardo DiCaprio with all the false bonhomie and underlying evil of Col. Lada himself. There’s a thrill to such characters, if only in the anticipation of their comeuppance, and seeing Waltz clash with his opposite number is one of the pleasures of Tarantino’s wheel-with-in-a-wheel cinema.

Schultz and Django are putting on an act — “you’ll be playing a character,” the dentist tells the freed slave — that is itself an act within an act, all running on the hamster wheel of homage. Django Unchained pays tribute to the 1974 film Mandingo, about black slaves forced to become fighters for their owners’ amusement, and it takes part of its title, as well as its notions of dangerous strangers, from the 1966 Italian movie Django, in which the silent killer rode into town dragging a coffin. It also borrows the star: Franco Nero is one of several cool/obscure actors who populate the film. His character asks Django to spell his name. “The D is silent,” Django says. “I know,” Nero’s gunman answers.

There are many more as well, chiefly Samuel L. Jackson as Stephen, Candie’s house slave and also his eyes and ears on all things black. Stephen is a frightening racial traitor: he can spot falseness, and he has sold his soul to do it.

In smaller roles are Don Johnson, Tom Wopat, Russ Tamblyn, Bruce Dern, Lee Horsley, Michael Parks and Tarantino himself, looking fairly prosperous, by the way. Jonah Hill has a cameo as a member of a racist gang, a sort of proto-KKK, who have a long and funny argument about how their masks don’t fit properly. It’s right out of Blazing Saddles, to which Django Unchained also owes a debt. For one thing, both have soundtracks of melodic anachronism: this one combines the likes of Jim Croce with the spaghetti themes of Ennio Morricone.

Django Unchained is a long film — the second half feels padded by at least half an hour — and a very bloody one. Images of people being whipped, torn apart by dogs, or hung upside down and threatened with castration come as violent shocks. But this is a story about slavery, and for all his love of quoting grindhouse classics, Tarantino is not afraid to look at it plainly. By the end, Django is a hero for his times: the D is silent, but nothing else is.

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